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Why Alex King’s Carrington WP theme is great.

I was stunned today to discover that a lot of people just don’t “get” the Carrington theme by Alex King and the team at Crowd Favorite. To me it’s a no-brainer why it’s so damn good, and why I’m basing a part of the functionality of my upcoming Vanilla theme on it.

So being a faster talker than a typer, I shot a fast and crappy video explaining my passion. Comments welcome below or here.

19 Comments

Thanks Alister for the great video. Your explanation of the problem, i.e. wanting complete flexibility in WordPress without modfying core theme files, has been a huge revelation to me and really extends WordPress beyond any previous understanding. Furthermore, Carrington seems like the best Theme Framework because of the ability to create a site by modifying both CSS and HTML output. I would love to hear more about actually how to do this with Carrington, although I’m sure their site will have tutorials.

I’m not sure I understood everything in the video, but I got most of it. It would seem that the Carrington WP Theme has some really great CSS code. I’m going to take a look at it and try to learn some lessons from it.

Right on, A.C. You’ve done a nice high level introduction to the relative power a theme/site developer can get from the Carrington framework. The challenge, however, is with site owners that will think this is just another theme install. While it can clearly be used right out of the box, the real power is in all the under the hood stuff you’ve described in your video. And it can be challenging to “get” as you say, not why to use it, but how to use it effectively.

There is a decent amount of logic behind the scenes that developers have to wrap their heads around. The documentation can, at times, leave one wanting for a bit more explanation. There are forums available and a limited amount of support is provided, however, from personal experience, you just have to get under the hood and start working with the theme framework itself.

I, for one, will be subscribing to your feed, and am looking forward to more information from you as you develop it from your experiences working with Carrington.

I think Carrington’s uptake (some will say slow, compared to Thesis or other “ra-ra” themes out there) reflects the fact that there are really only a relatively few people out there who have tried to push WordPress consistently and aggressively in the direction of a CMS, where pages are at least as important as, if not more important than, posts. Also, where a number of custom page and/or post templates need to be created to accommodate the inherent complexities of content-types as is the case with a CMS, but perhaps not with a blog.

It follows then, that Thesis (to take that example, since it gets so much “airtime”) — if I have understood it correctly — is an attempt to make self-hosted WordPress blogging fun and simple, as far as the design and presentation-related functionality is concerned. Same with most of the other well-known themes and/or “frameworks” out there.

Carrington, however (and I trust, my Vanilla, when I can get it done) is only ever going to be properly appreciated by people who are using WordPress to build non-blogs, for want of a word.

I’m thinking magazine sites with multiple landing-page levels, for example, or business websites, or sites which need to accommodate a number of custom content types, like FAQs, job classifieds, photos, whatever.

Those devs who get into THAT kind of WordPress work realize two things (at least I have): that WordPress is eminently capable of the task, and that the great majority of theme “frameworks” (not that there are many) offer little to help make the unique challenges of such projects easier to deal with.

I wanna say more about that so perhaps another blog post is in order 🙂

Yes I like this Carrington theme. It gives a nice feel while being clear and direct – the design does not get in the way or distract from the message although i’m assuming the ‘themes’ and ‘framework’ sections are not standard with the them – because those do get in the way.

Thanks for this. The text theme looks great, as does the mobile theme.
I actually think that these framework themes DO need to be promoted. Themes like Carrington make it very easy for folks with some knowledge to construct a perfect theme for their own use. Too many of the free themes either come with fluff or have to be tweaked to get where you need it. That tweaking time is probably all you need to have the Carrington theme exactly the way you need it.

I’d love to see your vid – However your plugin-detection seems to fail. Running Vista here and neither Firefox, Opera nor IE will show the vid – although I have Flash and Javascript enabled in all three

Just came here looking for new themes. This is new to me and just heard of this Carrington theme. I checked out some of their themes and I actually like it. They are clean and very professional but I think they are not qualified for a site being a Google news source.